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Digital media keeps politicians on their toes

World of journalism and politics changed utterly by digital media

Dustin Hoffman, left, as Carl Bernstein, and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward in the classic All the President's Men. The film depicts its journalist duo as taking notes on paper, with never a recording device to be seen — a laughably ancient practice today.

By susan delacourtottawa bureau

Fri., Aug. 2, 2013

When journalism helped set in motion the downfall of U.S. president Richard Nixon about 40 years ago, there was no such thing as email, YouTube or social media.

Now it’s nearly impossible to imagine a scandal without them.

Nixon’s Watergate may have inspired a couple of generations of investigative journalism in the decades hence, but the tools and standards for truth in reporting have moved several dimensions beyond the 1970s.

When you think about it, in fact, a digital or electronic thread has been running through all the big scandals in the news the past few weeks and months — a type of evidence largely unavailable to the crusading reporters of decades past.

Consider some of the big headlines of the past few months:

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This week, more emails came to light in the ongoing saga over gas-plant cancellations in Ontario. This new flurry of correspondence was especially disturbing, showing that ex-premier Dalton McGuinty’s office was looking for ways to pressure the Speaker of the Legislature to play along with the government.

A $90,000 payout to Senator Mike Duffy, a personal cheque from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, became a public scandal in part because of email evidence — messages that the RCMP would like to obtain from CTV reporter Robert Fife.

Again in the Prime Minister’s Office, a hyper-partisan staffer made the mistake of sending out an email asking for Nixon-like “enemies” lists to be included in briefing books for new ministers.

In Toronto just this week, videos recorded the police shooting and Tasering of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on a streetcar. The videos sparked public outrage, which continues, over excessive police force on a suspect. The same kind of outrage boiled over when people saw the videos of the RCMP using a Taser on Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, a 2007 case that was also in the news this week because of a court ruling on the officers and the video evidence. (link:

And of course, a video is also at the centre of the story about Mayor Rob Ford’s alleged visit with crack cocaine dealers in Etobicoke. The story was broken by the Star after reporters saw the video, multiple times, and much of the subsequent controversy was consumed by efforts to obtain the evidence — plus assertions that the video may not exist.

The Ford controversy was much on my mind a few weeks ago, when I rewatched All the President’s Men, the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the reporters who helped bring down Nixon after exposing the burglary at the Watergate hotel.

It was interesting to see how little the reporters relied on tape recorders or electronic evidence of any kind. When they were asked to verify their stories, they went to their notes or rushed to the telephones to find additional sources, none of the conversations taped, it appears. Those notes and those sources were enough to rattle the White House to its foundations.

The movie reminded me of my first days working for a big newspaper, 30 years ago, when we were told that tape recorders weren’t encouraged because they made reporters lazy listeners. Taking good notes was the hallmark of a professional reporter.

Veterans of Parliament Hill told me too that tape recorders didn’t become standard fare until TV came to the Commons in the late 1970s, and politicians started speaking to the cameras, instead of the reporters. Apparently, before TV, political folks spoke slowly and deliberately enough that reporters could take down the words in their notepads.

Ironically enough, Nixon’s fate was sealed by tape recordings — or more precisely, the lack of them. Exactly 40 years ago this summer, Nixon was refusing to hand over tapes from his office to a Senate investigating committee. A year later, the tapes finally were released, albeit with 18-plus minutes erased. Nixon resigned not long afterward, in August 1974.

These days, it’s hard to imagine a politician resigning, or even admitting mistakes, without some kind of electronic record of the misdeed.

We’ve been hearing a lot this week, especially in light of the tragic streetcar shooting in Toronto, that videos don’t tell the whole story, and we shouldn’t base all our evidence on what the camera sees.

In Ottawa, the PMO seems to have adopted a strategy of merely ignoring email evidence — refusing to comment on the “internal communications” of the enemies list, for instance. The thinking there, apparently, is that electronic proof only exists if you acknowledge it.

The big change from the Watergate era is that everyone with a smartphone now has the ability to record — and publish — digital evidence. The world is awash in recorded data and email chains.

It has us asking useful questions about the nature of proof, from journalists, politicians and citizens.

And those are harder questions than the ones asked during Watergate, when the mere presence of reporters’ notes could help bring down a president.

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